California is not experiencing a water shortage, yet firefighters battling the brutal fires in Los Angeles are faced with scarce resources to battle the blaze that has threatened thousands of lives, homes, land and wildlife.
Meanwhile, critics are questioning this Gov. Gavin Newsom call to ‘not play politics’, arguing that political mismanagement is precisely to blame.
“It’s all political,” Edward Ring, director of water and energy policy at the California Policy Center think tank, told Fox News Digital in an interview. “The whole thing is political, and ironically they are politicizing it by saying it’s about climate change, which is a political wedge that they use all the time, which is actually one of the least of the factors causing this.”
Experts place the blame primarily on the state’s handling of forest management and a lesser-known problem: the state’s outdated water resources system. California exists reservoirs can only hold a certain amount of water, and many were built in the mid-20th century.
Last year, the state experienced record-breaking rainfall after an atmospheric river event, but existing water infrastructure had problems managing the sudden influx of water. A significant portion of that rainfall was dumped into the ocean.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass tour the Pacific Palisades business district as the Palisades Fire continues to burn in Los Angeles on January 8, 2025. (Eric Thayer/Getty Images)
Ring also pointed to “environmental extremists” in the state who have pushed for tougher regulations such as the Endangered Species Act, which requires freshwater to flow through rivers to the Pacific Ocean to protect endangered delta smelt and salmon. The mandates limit how much water can be diverted to storage, even during wet years.
“There is plenty of water,” Ring argues, but the main challenge in transporting water south, to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley and cities in Southern California, is not infrastructure capacity. environmental policy. He points to a “consensus among the bureaucrats and administrative directors” who oversee water management in California, prioritizing keeping more water in rivers to support endangered fish.
“That’s true as far as it goes,” he said, but despite these efforts, salmon and smelt populations have not recovered. In addition, there is increasing concern that the sturgeon may soon be classified as endangered as well.
“These endangered fish are used as a reason to leave water in the rivers,” he said.
Khaled Fouad and Mimi Laine embrace as they inspect a family member’s property that was destroyed by the Eaton Fire on January 9, 2025 in Altadena, California. Fanned by intense Santa Ana winds, the Eaton Fire has grown to more than 25,000 acres and destroyed many homes and businesses. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Urban areas, such as Los Angeles, have highly developed drainage systems that direct stormwater directly to the ocean. They were originally designed for flood prevention and not water storage. This therefore poses an additional challenge for the area.
“They’re bringing in water through the California Aqueduct, and they’re importing water into Los Angeles, and they haven’t brought enough in there, and their reservoirs are depleted,” Ring said. ‘But the biggest problem, because when fighting a fire you are not even going to pump out a half-full reservoir, is the water infrastructure. in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles’s water infrastructure has been neglected. And the reason it has been neglected is because they want the money for other projects.”
“The bottom line is they didn’t spend any money on it, and they justified it by saying we should use less water,” he continued. “And so they’ve encouraged people, and in some cases rationed or even forced people, to use less water. And as a result, you don’t have a system that’s as robust.”
A recent ex-California lawmaker said the state’s lack of water infrastructure is “devastating California.”
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A woman reacts as she evacuates after high winds fuel devastating wildfires in the Los Angeles area at the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, on January 8, 2025. (David Swanson/Reuters)
California voters passed Proposal 1 in 2014, also known as the Water Quality, Supply and Infrastructure Improvement Act, which authorized $2.7 billion in bonds to increase the state’s water storage capacity through the construction of new reservoirs and groundwater storage facilities. But since January 2025, no new reservoirs have been completed under Prop. 1.
“And here it’s been all these years, and we haven’t even put a shovel full of dirt into making the project happen,” Dahle said. “The project just wasn’t funded, and we had a $100 billion surplus, and we didn’t fund it. And that’s the frustrating part for most Californians, I think, when we had the money, and we didn’t do anything about it.”
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The largest of the wildfires, the Eaton Fire near Altadena and Pasadena, has scorched more than 27,000 acres, Cal Fire reported Thursday afternoon.
When reached for comment, Newsom spokesperson Izzy Gardon told Fox News Digital: “The governor is focused on keeping people safe, not playing politics, and ensuring firefighters have all the resources they need to have.”
